CULTURE WATCH : Looking Good--a Dating Game

The party is swarming with potential dates, so you mentally review your wish list: a good talker with a sense of humor, rewarding career and interesting hobbies.

Then you find yourself gravitating to the most attractive person in the room--the one with the million-dollar smile and oodles of charm--who might prove to be humorless, jobless and commitment-phobic.

Before berating yourself as hopelessly shallow, consider some new input from behavioral scientist Wayne Hensley of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. What happens, he suspects, is a shift from our logical, list-making behavior to a behavior style he calls “social exchange,” in which we pursue “profits.” We act more like we’re engaging in an economic transaction than in a social, interpersonal one.

Still, Hensley understands the rationale. “Suppose you want someone who shares your sense of money,” he says. “It will ‘cost’ you some time and effort to find out how he spends,” says Hensley, whose research appears in the journal Psychological Reports. It would undoubtedly take more than one date, for instance, to find out he prefers Sizzler to that fancy French place.

“But the easiest thing in the world is to assess physical attractiveness,” Hensley says. “That’s why it’s the first thing we go after.”

Beyond that, of course, we might fantasize that those gorgeous people really do possess all the other attributes on our list. “Hope does spring eternal,” Hensley says.